Reflections on Standards, Teaching, and Learning

This is a speech I gave on March 22, 2014 at the UCLA Conference "Critical Teaching and the Common Core." It is adapted and abridged from a chapter in the new edition of Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.

Standards are criteria used to judge competence, and we rely on them every day, all the time: in sports or cooking, in raising children or voting, in forming relationships or teaching school. Another basic truth about standards is that we argue about them. This is surely true in education, where standards have a contentious history.

When I was working in programs for underprepared high school and college students back in the 1980s, a national debate emerged over standards, expressed as a conflict between equity—which was defined as increasing access to higher education—and excellence, holding firm on rigor and achievement. The nation then saw the rise of the standards movement, an attempt to articulate precisely what students should know K–12, grade by grade, about history or mathematics or social studies—and to align instruction to these standards. And this movement led to another set of debates about district or state control versus local autonomy and teacher independence. An emphasis on accountability then became part of standards talk, and it all intensified considerably with the advent of high-stakes testing, most notably the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These days, all eyes are on Common Core State Standards, which I’ll address momentarily.

Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of any of these concerns about standards, the discourse and debates around them have narrowed and polarized our understanding of standards, the way we define standards and conceive of them in instruction.

I think we need additional ways to talk about standards if we are to help students develop what educator Mina Shaughnessy calls their “incipient excellence.”

Let’s start from the specifics of the classroom. Although I hope that what I say applies to other domains, I’m going to ground my discussion on the teaching of remedial writing at the college level and begin with two classroom stories—stories that extend back into high school.

Vince received a PhD from a prestigious psychology department, so he tells his story from the enviable position of one who has succeeded in the academy. Coming from a working-class, Mexican immigrant background, Vince learned his first English from a television set, but with his parents’ encouragement, he worked hard at his second language, and by high school, he was taking college-preparatory English classes. These classes were designed to help students do well on achievement tests and the SAT. The classes consisted primarily of workbook grammar exercises, although students also read some literature and wrote a few book reports. After completing high school, Vince figured he was ready for college, so he was stunned when he sat for his university English placement exam: “We were supposed to answer a question on a reading passage, something on the use of grain—and we were supposed to argue for one position or another. ‘What the hell am I supposed to write?’ I thought. They wanted an argumentative paper, though I didn’t know that then.... I knew my grammar, but applying it to that kind of writing was another story.”

Vince’s poor performance landed him in remedial English. As he recalls, “The teacher seemed very distant and cold. I’d get my papers back graded with a C or lower and with red marks about my style all over them.” Vince couldn’t figure out what the teacher wanted: “I kept trying, but I kept getting the same grades. I went through this routine for four or five weeks, becoming more withdrawn. Finally I said, ‘Forget this,’ and stopped going to class.”

Vince took the class again two quarters later and got a teacher who gave feedback in a more useful way and was more encouraging. He started going to the campus tutoring center and asked for help from teaching assistants in other courses in which the instructors had assigned papers. He learned to write good academic prose and in graduate school was frequently complimented for his writing.

Vince’s story illuminates several problems with how standards are used and misused in the teaching of English. Often, they are reduced to so-called objective measures, like multiple-choice tests of grammar and usage, and although the instruction geared toward such measures can be specific and targeted, it is also pretty limited. Vince’s high-school English classes had been labeled “college preparatory,” so he believed they would prepare him to write in college, but they had not even prepared him for his first university writing assignment, the English placement exam. This discontinuity in requirements and the standards used to assess performance—in this case the shift from grammatical analysis to the development of an effective argument—is common.

In his first college class, Vince faced another problem associated with standards: they often are applied to students’ work in ways that shut down rather than foster learning. In Vince’s case, the teacher seemed to value a literary style and rejected as inadequate Vince’s more straightforward prose. Such teachers match student work against an internalized model of excellence and find the work lacking, rather than using their knowledge of genre, rhetorical strategy, and style to assess the ways a paper could be improved, given what the writer seems to be trying to do. This kind of teacher functions more like a gatekeeper than an educator. Standards used this way become a barrier to development.

Here’s a second story, a briefer one, and it comes from a remedial English class at an inner-city community college in Los Angeles. About thirty students are enrolled, most of them from working-class backgrounds and a variety of ethnic origins, ranging from Armenian to Salvadoran. The students have been writing educational autobiographies. And one of the interesting issues they raise involves standards. Some express anger at past teachers who didn’t hold high expectations for them, who didn’t explain the criteria for competence and hold students to them, who didn’t help their students master the conventions of written English that they’re struggling with now. Some of these teachers sound as though they were burned out, but others seemed reluctant to impose their standards for philosophical or political reasons or because they thought a less rigorous pedagogy was better suited to these students. One teacher, for example, is described as “hang loose,” a man who created a pleasant classroom atmosphere but played down the evaluation of students’ work.

This episode highlights the important role that standards and high expectations play in good teaching. It also clarifies why so many educators and parents from poor or nondominant communities—though mindful of the injustices that can occur in the name of standards—are calling for classrooms in which standards are clearly articulated and maintained. Standards that are employed fairly facilitate learning and show students that their teachers believe in their ability to meet academic expectations.

People leery about calls for standards need to remember their benefits and reclaim them for democratic ends, despite the fact that standards and assessments can be used to limit access and stratify students, or can lead to an overly prescriptive and narrow curriculum. At the same time, the champions of standards need to take a closer look at how standards and our means of measuring student mastery of them can limit, rather than advance, the intellectual development they desire.

To develop our fuller discussion about standards, we must hold Vince’s story about the misapplication of standards and the community college students’ tale of low expectations—we need to hold these two stories simultaneously in mind, in productive tension. As we do so, some questions emerge.

1.     The current drive to enact and enforce standards by statistical measures dominates schooling. But what effects do such measures have on instruction? Standardized measures can limit the development of competence by driving curricula toward the narrow demands of test preparation instead of allowing teachers to immerse students in complex problem solving and rich use of language.

2.     How good are we at explaining our standards to students? Too much teaching is like the instruction Vince encountered in his first remedial course: teachers match a response or product against an inadequately explained criterion of excellence. To avoid such stifling imposition of standards and to encourage student expression, some teachers refrain from applying their criteria of effective performance. But this can be problematic as well, for many students report that they feel cheated, and sometimes baffled, by such instruction.

3.     How can we reconceive standards so that they function not just as final measures of competence but also as guides to improving performance? Many discussions of standards stay at the level of test scores or curricular end goals. Instead of these static measures of attainment, our focus should shift to the dynamics of development. Such a shift would have led Vince’s first teacher to make explicit the distinctions he saw between his criteria and Vince’s performance. He also would have tried to understand the possibilities of Vince’s own style and helped his student enhance it with some stylistic options drawn from the teacher’s more elaborate repertoire.

4.     What about the transitions students face as they move from one level of the educational system to another? Are the standards we use coherent—that is, is there some level of agreement between secondary and postsecondary institutions about what constitutes competence in a given discipline? What opportunities exist—for example, through college-school alliances—that would help us articulate areas of agreement and disagreement so that students like Vince don’t find themselves baffled by very different kinds of curricula and sets of expectations?

5.     How reflective are we about the attitudes and assumptions that underlie our standards? How open are we to considering the provisional nature of these standards and modifying them?

__________

With these thoughts on standards as backdrop, let me consider the newest incarnation of standards, Common Core State Standards, and begin by revisiting Vince and those community college students.

Vince’s high school English classes didn’t prepare him for his freshman composition placement exam, which required him to write an argument using a nonfiction text. It is exactly this disconnect between segments of the educational system that Common Core hopes to address. Also, under Common Core, Vince would have had more experience writing from specific texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Whether you like or loathe the kind of writing exam Vince encountered, at least it would not have been unfamiliar to him. Then there were those students we met in the community college classroom, the ones who regretted not having a more rigorous high school English curriculum, the kind Common Core could yield—perhaps leading to fewer of them being held for remedial English.

So hypothetically both Vince and the community college students would have benefitted from Common Core. Well and good.

Yet, there is a broader question underlying Common Core: what kind of education benefits a democracy brimming with a diversity of backgrounds, interests, motivations, abilities? Common Core Standards reflect a traditional liberal studies approach to the school curriculum: a close attention to written texts, an emphasis on the reasoning behind a claim or an answer in mathematics, an attention to precision in writing and speaking, and so on. The advocates of Common Core see it as an egalitarian curriculum, a kind of college prep curriculum for all. I am sympathetic to this position, having worked with so many students who lack these skills. But this position is not without its pitfalls. Students who will experience Common Core from the primary grades on will arguably benefit the most from it. But a number of those who move into Common Core in middle and high school will need additional support to meet the standards’ level of expectation. And those who teach these students might well need high-quality professional development not only to get into the Common Core groove but also to adapt and adjust the curriculum and the way it’s taught for the students struggling with it.

To complicate matters, there is another, very different, way to respond to this issue of diversity of motivations and interests, and it is the other side in an American debate that is more than a century old. While it may seem democratic to give a similar curriculum to everyone, it is democratic as well to respond to the varied needs and interests of the students who fill our classrooms, some of whom simply are not the least bit taken by the traditional liberal arts, no matter how well taught. So an academic curriculum meant to increase retention and achievement in school could have the opposite effect. As Anthony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, quipped about efforts like Common Core, maybe what we need is not only “Math for Harvard” but also “Math for Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning.” Carnevale’s perspective can lead to curricular tracking—a real danger—but it can also lead us to think more carefully about the mathematical (or literate or scientific) possibilities in occupations.

Debates about the content of curriculum standards are to be expected, and, in fact, can be generative, leading to a richer course of study and to creative teaching. But the other piece of the current standards enterprise, the machine at the core of implementation, is assessment, and many who differ in their opinion of Common Core agree that the thing that will make or break Common Core is the quality of assessment.

There are good reasons to worry, given recent history. Many of the early supporters of Common Core saw it as an antidote to the reductive tendencies of NCLB, but some are now worried that those tendencies are being repeated. How soon will policy makers expect positive outcomes? We are a country that wants quick results, and in the contentious, high-pressure world of school reform, that expectation will not be easy to temper. Furthermore, will the demands of policy makers for precise metrics force a reductive assessment of bits and pieces of the curriculum rather than the “core knowledge and skills” advocated by the architects of Common Core? Sadly, this is already happening.

There is a lot of faith being put into the development of assessments for Common Core, but the fact is that we don’t have the testing technology that can validly measure many of the kinds of rich, complex thinking that is at the heart of Common Core. It is very much an open question as to whether or not we can develop such tests—at least in the ways that would mesh with high-stakes, broad-scale accountability. One illustration of my concern is the brief writing sample that is part of the current assessment plan. The sample will be scored by a computer, based on certain semantic and syntactic features in the writing. It’s doubtful that this approach gets to “deep learning” rather than simply providing a count of the features a computer can detect.

Then there is the issue of funding. The initial money for Common Core came from philanthropies and in various ways through Race to the Top. It will not last, so where will the resources come from to maintain Common Core? Policy makers hope that the market will take over as publishing and testing companies assume the expense and risk of full-scale implementation. But markets easily put profits over educational interests, and that basic truth has generated some of the deepest suspicions about Common Core. There is big money to be made if you have most states adopting one accountability system rather than state-by-state systems. We live in a capitalist economy, so the publishing and testing industries are simply a part of mass education, and have been for some time. But critics point to the scale of the Common Core enterprise; the monopoly that a few megacorporations will have on curricular materials and assessment; the fact that some of the philanthropies that contributed to Common Core are connected to high-tech companies that could also profit; and the recent appointment of the chief architect of Common Core, David Coleman, to the head of the College Board with plans of revising the SAT to reflect the standards he created. If Occupy Wall Street activists set out to write a screenplay about all this, they couldn’t be handed better material.

So the big question as we move forward with Common Core is whether the political demands and the technical limitations of assessment, combined with the profit motive, will end up driving the curriculum, thereby repeating the troubling pattern we saw develop under other high-stakes accountability programs, particularly NCLB.

Curriculum standards provide guidance on what students need to know and be able to do, but also, at their best, offer a vision of education. The liberal studies orientation of Common Core is certainly not new, but because of the considerable consensus that developed around it, Common Core promised a significant change in an NCLB-dominated landscape. It is the vision of Common Core that excited those teachers who have been working to bring it to a full range of students, not only those who are the most poised to receive it.

John Dewey makes this observation about subject matter: “[T]he various studies represent working resources, available capital...[yet] the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils’ present needs and capabilities.” Dewey reminds us of the intimate and powerful relationship between a subject (literature, or biology, or geography) and human development—with teaching as the mediating force. Standards and expectations are a crucial part of the dynamic, though that dynamic can become distorted if we hold to a rigid conceptualization of standards or get consumed in the technical development and assessment of them. It is finally our philosophy of education, our fundamental justification for schooling, that gives standards—any definition of standards—their meaning.

The fatal flaw in the development of our thinking about standards is the belief that they need to be both put into practice and measured through high-stakes standardized tests, that the tests will ensure proper implementation—“incentivize” it. But these kinds of tests run the risk of undermining the very spirit of Common Core: a clash of a technocratic and a humanistic conception of learning.

The ultimate test of Common Core—and an object lesson for standards-based accountability in general—will be which conception of learning carries the day.

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Some Cautions about the New Character Education: An excerpt from the 2014 edition of Why School?

Character education is enjoying a resurgence. There is much talk about building perseverance, determination, flexibility, or (the everpresent buzzword) “grit.” Educators of many stripes are interested in character, though a good deal of the attention seems to be focused on low-income children—the hope being that building character might be effective in reducing the achievement gap. Journalist Paul Tough wrote a best-selling book, How Children Succeed, that summarizes the new character education, and University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her research in this area.

I certainly don’t dispute the importance of qualities like perseverance and flexibility and, as is the case with so many teachers, do my best to foster them, but I am also worried that we, once again, are seeking a miracle cure for the entrenched social problems of poverty and inequality. What follows is a kind of extended cautionary tale.

This is a chapter from the new edition of Why School? that was printed in Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post “Answer Sheet” column on February 6 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/06/the-misguided-effort-to-teach-character/). Readers of my blog will recognize sections of it from separate pieces I posted during February of last year.

***

One of the surest claims one could make about how to lead a successful life, in or out of school, is that qualities such as determination, perseverance, self-control, and a degree of flexibility matter a lot. In American education, these qualities often get labeled as “character,” and there is a rapidly growing interest in how to teach and measure it. Conferences, consultants, and special issues of journals are focusing on character, and in late 2012 journalist Paul Tough wrote a bestselling book, How Children Succeed, that nicely summarizes the various bodies of research and advocates behind the current boom.

            As I watch twenty-first-century character education take off, I worry about two things, my worry born out of decades of watching new ideas—or, often, old wine in new bottles—capture our attention. One concern has to do with the way these qualities of character get defined, the other with the focus of a fair amount of the discussion on the education of low-income children.

***

            There is some confusion as to what to call qualities like perseverance or self-control. Some refer to them as personality traits, which in psychology refers to a set of relatively stable characteristics. Yet a quality like perseverance might change with setting, age, and task. I am dogged in writing an essay like this but become pretty squirrelly with tax forms or figuring out electronic devices.

            A further, and I think major, problem with terminology and definition has to do with the widespread tendency to refer to these qualities as “noncognitive” traits or skills. To understand the problem here, consider the definition of cognition and the way it’s been distorted in our recent educational history.

Cognition traditionally refers to a wide and rich range of mental processes, from memory and attention, to comprehending and using language, to solving a difficult problem in physics or choreography or sharing an office with someone. But over the last few decades cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, cognition in education policy has increasingly come to be defined by the skills measured by standardized tests of reading and mathematics. And as economists have gotten more involved in education, they’ve needed quantitative measures of cognitive ability and academic achievement for their analytical models, so they’ve used I.Q. or other standardized test scores (like the Armed Forces Qualification Test or AFQT) as a proxy for intelligence or achievement. From the Latin cognoscere, to come to know, or cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, we’ve devolved to a few digits on the AFQT.

            Many of those who advocate character education believe that our nation’s educational focus on cognition has been misguided. Rather than focusing our energies on the academic curriculum—or on academic intervention programs for the poor—we need to turn our attention to the development of qualities of character, for as much or more than cognition, it is these qualities that account for success in school and life.

It is healthy to be reminded about the fuller scope of education in our test- and grade-obsessed culture, but what concerns me is that the advocates for character accept without question the reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies, and by accepting it, further affirm it. The problem is exacerbated by the aforementioned way economists carve up and define mental activity. If cognition is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not captured in those scores—like the desired qualities of character—is, de facto, noncognitive. We’re now left with a skimpy notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot. This downplaying of the cognitive and the construction of the cognitive/noncognitive binary will have some troubling implications for education, especially for the education of the children of the poor.

To begin with, the labeling of character qualities as “noncognitive” misrepresents them—particularly if you use the truer, richer notion of cognition. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state—a profoundly cognitive activity. Flexibility demands a weighing of options and decision making. This is not just a problem of terminology, for if you don’t have an accurate description of something, how can you help people develop it?

Furthermore, these desired qualities are developed over time in settings and relationships that are meaningful to the participants, which most likely means that the settings and relationships will have significant cognitive content. Two of the classic preschool programs that have provided a research base for the character advocates—the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian Projects—were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language use, and activities that required thought and cooperation.

A very different example comes from a study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they were doing and help others do it. You could be by inclination the most determined or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with a garment or an engine, your tendencies won’t be realized in a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.

Also, we have to consider the consequences of this cognitive/non-cognitive binary in light of the history of American educational practice. We have a powerful tendency toward either/or policies—think of old math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given this tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away from the academic and toward character education. And over the past fifty years attempts at character education as a distinct pursuit have not been particularly successful—in some cases, student behavior is not affected, or changes in beliefs and behaviors don’t last.

Finally, the focus of the current character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive domain. There’s a stirring moment in Paul Tough’s book where a remarkable chess teacher decides she’s going to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an admissions test for New York’s selective high schools. What she found was that this stunningly bright boy had learned pitifully little academic knowledge during his eight years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a strong academic education for children like him.

This example brings to the fore my second concern about the current championing of character education. When the emphasis on character is focused on the individual attributes of poor children as the reason for their subpar academic performance, it can remove broader policies to address poverty and educational inequality from public discussion.

***

One of the powerful strands in the current discussion of character education is that it might succeed where academic interventions have failed in reducing the achievement gap. Perhaps psychological and educational interventions that focus on developing perseverance, self-control, and the like will help poor children succeed in school. Such qualities are indisputably key to a successful life, and they’ve been part of our folk wisdom about success well before Dale Carnegie made millions by promoting the power of positive thinking. But they’ve gained luster via economic modeling, psychological studies, and the technological advances of neuroscience. Because brain imaging allows us to see the frontal lobes light up when someone weighs a decision, these claims about character seem cutting edge. It is this aura of the new that contributes to a belief that we might have found a potent treatment for the achievement gap.

A diverse group of players is involved in this rediscovery and championing of character. Nobel Laureate in economics James Heckman advocates early childhood intervention programs for poor kids. Some charter schools, KIPP among them, infuse character education throughout the school day. And a whole range of smaller extracurricular and after-school programs—from Chicago’s OneGoal to a chess club in a public school in Brooklyn—focus their efforts in helping the children of the poor develop a range of mental strategies and shifts in perception aimed toward academic achievement.  I have worked with economically and educationally disadvantaged children and adults for forty years and know the importance of special programs and interventions. They need to be funded and expanded, for poor kids carry a heavy load and have absurdly limited access to any kind of school-related enrichment, especially as inequality widens.

            But we have to be very careful, given the political tenor of our time, not to assume that we have the long-awaited key to helping the poor overcome the assaults of poverty. My worry is that we will embrace these essentially individual and technocratic fixes—mental conditioning for the poor—and abandon broader social policy aimed at poverty itself.

            We have a long-standing shameful tendency in America to attribute all sorts of pathologies to the poor. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, the authors of a report from the Boston School Committee bemoaned the “undisciplined, uninstructed…inveterate forwardness and obstinacy” of their working-class and immigrant students. There was much talk in the Boston Report and elsewhere about teaching the poor “self-control,” “discipline,” “earnestness” and “planning for the future.” This language is way too familiar. 

            Some poor families are devastated by violence, uprooting, and substance abuse, and children are terribly affected. But some families hold together with iron-willed determination and instill values and habits of mind that middle-class families strive for. There’s as much variability among the poor as in any group, and we have to keep that fact squarely in our sights, for we easily slip into one-dimensional generalities about them.

            Given a political climate that is antagonistic toward the welfare state and has further shredded our already compromised safety net, psychosocial intervention may be the only viable political response to poverty available. But can you imagine the outcry if, let’s say, an old toxic dump were discovered near Scarsdale or Beverly Hills and the National Institutes of Health undertook a program to teach kids strategies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didn’t do anything to address the dump itself?

            We seem willing to accept remedies for the poor that we are not willing to accept for anyone else. We should use our science to figure out why that is so—and then develop the character and courage to fully address poverty when it is an unpopular cause.

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